Abstract [en]

The seafloor of high-latitude Polar margins is characterized by various submarine glacigenic landforms whose shape and texture were created, and subsequently modified, by ice. These glaciogenic landforms together with deposited seafloor sediments serve as a record of the past glacial history. The Multibeam Echo Sounder (MBES) technology provides a tool to map and study submarine glaciogenic landforms and seafloor texture. MBES bathymetric images have afforded scientists a way to understand many glacial processes such as iceberg movements, advance and retreat patterns of ice sheets, and polar underwater currents, among others. Aside from measuring the bathymetry, MBES systems also record the returned intensity, or backscatter, of the acoustic pulse. Recent developments have shown that the backscatter information can be used to distinguish/classify differences in the surface sediment types. Here we present the preliminary results of an analysis of backscatter data aimed to characterize sediment types at locations of the Arctic and Antarctic margins mapped with Swedish icebreaker Oden and the installed Kongsberg EM122, 12 kHz, deep water MBES. We apply the Angular Range Analysis (ARA) method that is included in the Geocoder Backscatter processing algorithm [Fonseca and Mayer, 2007]. The results are correlated with other geophysical data and core samples to ground-truth the resulting seafloor maps.